


Had this one Day not been

by middlemarch



Category: Mercy Street (TV)
Genre: American Civil War, Angst, F/M, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Letters, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-22
Updated: 2017-01-24
Packaged: 2018-09-19 06:46:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,156
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9423146
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/middlemarch/pseuds/middlemarch
Summary: He'd been sent from Mansion House and he hadn't wanted to go.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ultrahotpink](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ultrahotpink/gifts).



> This was inspired by a perusal of the PBS Mercy Street website and thus, spoilers for Season 2. I have no idea how the actual show will go, but I am making a pre-emptive strike for my characters. If you don't want to be spoiled at all, don't read this until the end of the season :) The title is from Emily Dickinson.

“Where is she?” Jed shouted. 

He’d looked in Mary’s room where she had been slowly, so slowly convalescing, and not found her, nor was she on any of the wards, back to work too soon, or sitting in the parlor attending to the correspondence she had worried over during her periods of lucidity; she was not in her little cupboard of a clinic with a sickly girl with empty eyes and a full belly and she was not sitting on the walnut bench in the front hall, occupied with bandages or needle-work, waiting for his return. He had asked patiently and politely-- Sister Mary Helen, several orderlies, Corporal Perron who’d been an installation since his botched surgery, and no one had known. She had been getting better, he knew she had, otherwise he would have resigned his commission rather than leave the hospital to go on McBurney’s “errand of mercy,” but she had been herself again, dutiful, determined Mary however weakened by fever, and she had laid her hand over his before he left and said softly “Come home, come back soon, Jedediah” after she’d wished him Godspeed and he had thought he could manage it, his responsibility and his love with the confidence of her faithful regard. And now she was nowhere to be seen and he was afraid that he couldn’t find her and what it meant.

“Dr. Foster! Ye might quiet yerself,” Matron said, appearing in the hallway as was her way, emerging from shadow, from the play of light on the paneling, everything about her drab and unremarkable except her gaze.

“Matron. I cannot find Mar--, I cannot find Nurse Phinney, you must know where she is,” he replied, his voice still strident, tightened with dismay and alarm.

“I thought as much. He’s a canny devil, make no mistake,” Matron said, more to herself than Jed, without a smile or any little reassurance in her tone and Jed felt dread, cold and heavy, icy mud filling his boots, sharp at the back of his neck like a bayonet’s blade, impelling him as it froze him. “Nurse Mary’s home,” the older woman added.

“What do you mean? She’s not here, she told me to come home to her before I left, she meant Mansion House and she isn’t. She’s. Not. Here,” he said. Matron couldn’t mean “home to the Lord,” she couldn’t mean Mary had died and he hadn’t been with her, hadn’t saved her, hadn’t known. He felt the wildness of grief beckoning and Matron saw it, hastened to reply.

“She went the day after you left. Captain McBurney, he put her on the ship to Washington City himself. I heard a widowed aunt or sister, can’t recall, was to meet her there and bring her back north. Boston, likely,” Matron explained. The immediate relief of knowing Mary lived lasted only a moment.

“She wasn’t well enough to walk down those stairs by herself! On a steamship alone and then a train? He’ll kill her—why?” Jed cried. Just the day before he’d left, Mary had stumbled in the short walk from her bed to the rocking chair Henry had brought to her room and Jed had caught her, felt how the illness had wasted her, her nightdress the most delicate barrier between his body and hers, now too slender, still feverish; he had felt how she let him hold her because she hadn’t the strength, not because she longed for his touch. He had felt such compelling tenderness for her then and she had known it, laid her head on his shoulder and nestled into him. He remembered how her plaited hair had been pressed between them, the feeling of her breath on his neck as she murmured “Thank you,” the faint sense of vitality returning to her when he’d said “Don’t thank me for this, Mary, not for caring, for loving--” and she had stopped him with a finger laid to his parted lips and let him hear the smile in her voice when she interrupted “I think I shall and you shan’t stop me.”

“He said to spare her, that she belonged at home where she could be nursed properly,” Matron said calmly. _Properly?_ Because McBurney hadn’t allowed Jed to do it, hadn’t permitted Anne Hastings to help, had wanted to abandon her the first day Mary hadn’t been working on the wards since dawn. They had fought, he and Jed, and Jed had thought himself the winner. He was too used to winning, Jed saw now, he expected it and convinced himself of it; he had been taken in and the other man had outflanked him. Both of them, it seemed. He could only pray she would survive the battle, the travel home and would wait for him to come back to her as she’d asked. 

“She belonged here.” He was bereft, not as he would have been by her death, but he suffered to know she would not walk down the hall to him, stand across a boy’s torn body with her own needle to help him close it, would not lift those dark eyes of hers to him, full of insight or mirth or even a companionable misery that sought his strength when hers flagged.

“Yer shoutin’ when ye got here, ye distracted me. She left this for ye.” Matron fished an envelope from the capacious pocket of her pinafore. However pristine it once had been, the paper was now creased and tinged at the edges with the grime Mary had never been able to rid the hospital of, but he didn’t care. He saw his name _Dr. Jedediah Foster_ in Mary’s hand, the neatly drawn bellies of the ds and the o, the exuberant loop of the J, her own hand and no one else’s.

“Thank you,” he said, wishing he did not have so little to be grateful for.

“Go read it, then. Ye won’t rest till ye do,” she said, waving him off, the smallest curve in her pursed lips. He could not wait for the secure privacy of his room, but at this time of day, the officer’s parlor was likely to be empty and so he took Mary’s letter there.

> My dear Jedediah,
> 
> I am so very sorry this will be the first letter I have written to you, that you do not have another longer and happier to console yourself with, but my health returns slowly and the world turns too quickly. I would not have you think I left you when I left Mansion House, that to leave Mansion House was the choice of my heart; neither is true. Perhaps if you had been here, you would have argued more diligently and effectively with Captain McBurney than I have been able to do, but you were not, because you did your duty and you trusted me and I cannot wish either of those undone. Oh, I will miss you, Jedediah, more than I can find words for, ~~my lo~~ but unlike you, I have a woman’s practice with being patient and should you want, I will wait for you when I am in Boston. I do not say home, for it is not that any longer, not without you, but there is comfort there and I will try to take solace in it. It is forward, beyond propriety, for me to ask you to write to me but I cannot help it and I do. If you are willing, you may address me at my sister’s house in Boston and know that I will be a faithful correspondent. Try not to trouble yourself over me; I have a strong constitution and you are aware of how willful I may be, I shall do very well with the trip save that I wish, oh I wish, I had been able to say good-bye to you. May God bless you and keep you, my dearest, all the days of your life. I shall keep you in my prayers and in my heart.
> 
> With devoted affection,
> 
> Mary

The letter was so full of her spirit, her kindness, her care and how much she thought of him, how well she knew him. It was blotted and more uneven than any other writing he’d seen of hers, undercutting her reassurance about how easy she would find the trip back to Massachusetts. Not home, though, not without him she’d written and that was the unqualified truth for him as well; where she was, his soul longed to be and would be at peace. Even ill, even weak and harried by McBurney, for whose suffering Jed could find no pity any longer, Mary had made sure to console him and give him hope, remind him of his duty, his honor and suggested how he might love her from afar, how she would love him. He traced _my dearest_ with his forefinger, imagined her face when she wrote it. Had she paused before or after, had she closed her beautiful, tired eyes and thought of him? He would ask, as circumspectly as he could, when he wrote to her and she would answer with her Yankee directness. He didn’t know if she had smiled when she wrote the endearment, but he knew she would tell him, her voice in his mind as he read, never lost to him.


	2. Chapter 2

She couldn’t imagine ever telling him how it had truly been, leaving Mansion House and travelling back to Boston. Perhaps in some distant future, when they were long-used to sitting side by side in a pleasant parlor, her needle-work in a Nantucket basket, her writing table stacked with the texts she was reading, afternoon light glinting off the inkwell, the brass fender before the hearth, the pocket-watch he took out to check against the clock chiming in the hall, when he might catch her hand as she walked by and bring it to his lips, turn it and press a second kiss into her palm, when she smiled at him over her shoulder as he helped unlace her stays and scolded him for never leaving his shoes outside the door to be polished. From the bed in the room her sister Caroline had given her, where she had spent so many hours dreaming and dozing since she’d arrived, she imagined such pretty scenes and she managed to conceal the tears they drew from her from her sister’s keen gaze. She was regaining her strength bit by bit, but despite Caroline’s assiduous care, the puddings and milk possets, the tonic Mary choked down twice a day, worse than the most bitter chicory she’d ever served in Alexandria, the cheering visits from her nephews and the cut crystal vase on the bedside that always held something green, a late-blooming rose or chrysanthemum, even some herbs from the kitchen window, it was taking time, more than Mary had expected and she couldn’t help but wonder how much all the tender, familiar care of her family and friends was worth weighed against her longing for Jedediah, the burden of her grief at being parted from him, the fear that a reunion would never come while they both walked the green and fragrant earth. She’d seen something like it at Mansion House, the listless soldier whose recovery seemed likely to catapult at any moment into a death rattle brought back to life by the arrival of mother, wife, even sister; perhaps she could not throw off her sickness without Jedediah’s presence, his surprising cossetting, his hand laid against her forehead to assess fever and then to stroke her cheek, his vigor and his undisguised affectionate need for her both fortifying her in equal measure.

What she had of him were his letters, which had come with some regularity, more than she’d expected, since she’d returned home. She could not write to him how it had been—the argument she’d had with McBurney, seemingly as soon as the last echo of Jed’s footsteps faded from the hospital, one argument or many, she couldn’t decide, a circuitous tangle she had not had the stamina to succeed in unraveling. She had not even been able to convince the man to wait until Jedediah returned, citing his role as her physician, trying to ignore the condescension that she saw in his eyes, the hint of a salacious gleam she hadn’t thought a man so upright capable of. She had wished she could shock McBurney and appear on the wards for morning rounds, concealing the trembling in her hands, the effort it took to listen to his discourse on bilious dyspepsia or the like through the lingering headache, but she had known the foolishness of it when she tried to attend to her own simple toilette and found herself reaching for something, the bed’s iron rail, the window-frame’s lip, to steady herself. She knew that there was no other at Mansion House to intercede for her and had determined to leave with her dignity and the promise from Matron that Jed would be told enough of the truth; Matron had held out her hand for the letter almost before the wax was set on the seal, a rare look of unadulterated approval in her eyes. She had not wanted to take Captain McBurney’s arm as she walked out the door to the carriage he’d arranged but she’d had no choice; she would have fallen without it. He was nearly silent during the ride to the steamship, a relative blessing, and he’d gruffly told her to expect her Aunt Agnes to meet her in Washington City, explaining, wrongly, “This is for the best, Baroness von Olnhausen, though you might not see it.”

It hadn’t been, not at all. She had spent the voyage praying—not to vomit, not to faint, not to forget her small carpetbag packed with the few treasures she’d brought, still so heavy in her gloved hand despite its size. She shivered with a resurgent fever and rued the lack of a veil for her bonnet, to protect her from the gaze of so many strange men. Her bed at Mansion House had been spare, the mattress thin and the blankets worn but how she missed them, the sounds of the nuns and the orderlies below, the murmur of men, the sense that there was someone about who might look in on her if her distress was very great and call Jedediah to her side. Every breath, every minute, she was further from him and she felt the pain of that grow with the vise around her lungs. The light was too bright and yet she could hardly see. She must have looked like an inebriate as she made her way off the ship, her steps uneven and halting; it was a wonder her aunt recognized her but she had and she’d recognized her illness, crying out “May!” just before Mary crumpled in the faint she’d struggled against for the past few hours. She’d woken to smelling salts and her bared hands being chafed in her aunt’s work-worn palms. Aunt Agnes had looked worried, an expression Mary could not remember seeing on her face, and she’d tried to rouse herself, managing to forestall the second, longer faint until they were aboard the train, the scent of soot mingling with the ammonia on the handkerchief held before her to bring her back to the noise of the engine and her aunt’s tense recitation of Ecclesiastes. She’d taken a little water then and choked down some biscuit, too exhausted to take a third bite. No variation of her aunt’s exhortations, even those softened with her childhood nickname “May” or “pet,” had been enough to help her keep a proper lady’s posture and she did not let herself consider what the trip would have been like with Jedediah by her side.

She knew she could not share any of it with him. She could not risk deepening the rift between the Chief Medical Officer and his XO and she sensed that Jedediah’s fury, once stoked, would blaze unabated. There was no one there who could settle him, Henry Hopkins too deferential, Matron too busy, Samuel’s skills limited and diverted by the pressing needs of the contraband. She wrote to him with great care, designing this sentence to reassure, that to stimulate, offering aspects of herself she had not trusted him with before. The War’s outcome was unsure and she shared her concerns about the strategy employed nationally, the subterfuge she’d noticed throughout Mansion House, the cipher she’d glimpsed in Pinkerton’s papers. She warned him, obliquely, of the danger the morphine might once again pose and paired it with a declaration of her deep affection, so he would neither take offense nor wallow in guilt. She was not at peace until each letter was finished and then as soon as it left the house, she was disturbed again; she read his responses to her until she’d memorized them but she always held them in her hand, as he must have, and touched the signature at the bottom lightly, the only caress allowed to her now. Her sister was observant but said little until the day she found Mary with her eyes full of tears and then asked, “May, so many letters and he’s not yet free—is it wise?”

She’d answered, “Wise, oh no, Caro, I don’t think that, but necessary” and her sister had sighed and poured her a fresh cup of tea, adding so much milk that the woody rose heart of it was lost in an unfurling, ivory cloud. She’d drunk it down to the dregs where the sugar collected and read again the letter on her lap, “ _My dearest love, I know I break all bounds with my greeting but I cannot help it. I cannot strike it through as you did in your own letter. I will not allow anything to contradict the truth of my feeling for you, not even my own pen. And ink is too dear to waste in anything but the truest words…_ ” She read that letter and all the rest as she recalled the nuns telling their rosaries, daily tying them together with a ribbon and placing them in a marquetry box. She had nothing else of his—not a handkerchief or a lock of his hair, his signet ring between her breasts on a delicate gold chain, a wedding ring engraved with their names on her finger. Nothing until he sent a letter with a red rose pressed between the foolscap’s folds and the words “dissolution” and “furlough” smeared with his haste. He’d apologized “I know you prefer violets, but all the meadows are casualties of the War and this red rose must do for now, but not forever,” and she’d smiled and slept without dreaming, waking to wonder if he’d receive the letter she wrote this morning or if it would cross him in his journey back to her.


End file.
